Gal Biran: How Base Is Turning Customers Into a GTM Force Multiplier

Speaker A: No human can really manage 150 accounts in a very detailed manner. AI is going to take some jobs. That's the reality. We're seeing it happening.

Speaker B: Treating it as a unit and just thinking everybody's in exactly the same place every time is a recipe for disaster. Because people are not.

Speaker A: Why don't we look at customers as partners? Why don't we build programs around making sure that we encourage the behaviors we want from our customers? At the end, your customers are a force multiplier for any one of those pillars and go to market. Influencers don't have to be Kim Kardashian. It's great, but she's expensive. Instead of asking for something. Coming with proof, coming for results, especially with AI. Now the world is a canvas. You can kind of build or create any program.

Speaker B: This is growth funds. We are back after nearly a year of not posting long form interviews. I missed this forum. I missed the deep conversations, I missed the context. And in the middle of what, uh, can only be described as a content dumpster fire because of AI, I think these real honest conversations become even more important. And in our first episode back, I am talking to Gao Viran. He is the co founder and CEO of Base, the customer marketing automation tool for B2B companies. The reason why I wanted to talk to Gal is that his company Base acquired one of my very favorite customer success products, Ever After. If you are a subscriber of the newsletter, you probably have heard me talk about Ever after in the past in the context of success plans. I think success plans are one of the most underutilized high leverage tools in the toolbox of a csm. It's how we guide our customers through the value realization journey and do it proactively. And Ever after powers that motion with a ton of cool AI tools that help teams scale. This is not an ad. I am genuinely a fan of Ever after and I was curious about the future of the company. Now that they have been acquired, I wanted to dig into this vision for how customer marketing and customer success connect as Base and Ever After. Connect as one business. The synergies that Gal sees that motivated the acquisition. And I will say that this conversation delivered. So without further ado, here's my interview with Gal Barran, the CEO of Base. Hey Gal, it's so great to have you here in the this Is Growth podcast. Welcome, welcome to the podcast. Uh, to get us started off, how about you introduce yourself to our audience? Who are you? What you do? Sure.

Speaker A: First of all, thank you for having me, Daphne. And it's exciting to be here. I'm, um, the CEO and co founder of a company called Base A.I. uh, recently also acquired a company in the customer success space called Ever After. I've been in the customer space, uh, customer facing programs and customer facing initiatives for basically all my kind, uh, of professional career. Always meeting customers, working with customers and excited to talk about everything. Customers. Yeah.

Speaker B: And honestly, I was so excited to have you here live. I know we had a conversation preparing to have this official recorded conversation and we dug into so many interesting topics that I know our audience is going to love. But again, before we dive in too deep, how does somebody like yourself end up in the world of customer experience? What was like this moment that made you realize that you wanted to build in this space?

Speaker A: Yeah, so for me it wasn't just one moment, it was kind of an accumulation of journeys or things that happened. But generally I worked at companies such as Microsoft, I worked at startups, I was always, like I said, customer facing and always working both with customers and partners. So always kind of thinking about these different Personas or different audiences that we work together with or serve as, you know, as vendors. And at some point I just built my own company and agency that was kind of helping companies with their customer initiatives because I saw so many times people try to get customer stories from their customers or try to build the right kind of reference flow for their customers or try to create some kind of onboarding program or, or co marketing program with partners or key customers. And these were all initiatives that I just started to support them building as an agency. And at some point it was like, we should productize this. There has to be a way to make it better and scale it. Um, and that's kind of where one thing led to another. And at some point, you know, I had this semi aha moment where hey, why don't we look at customers as partners? Why don't we build programs around making sure that we encourage the behaviors we want from our customers to get them to better adopt, to better grow, to better, better kind of leverage our product and also hopefully spread the word about us and become advocates and we build some kind of partnership relationship where there's something in it for them and it doesn't matter if that thing is giving them more access, prioritizing their product request, giving them the ability to meet with executives as a CAB member or an advisor, um, or even giving them, you know, gamification and rewards or free tickets to your events, but making it more of a joint partnership and joint go to Market also with customers versus, you know, they are the buyer, you are the seller, and that's kind of how the relationship looks. Um, so, yeah, we build around that.

Speaker B: Um, I love that so much. We talk about customers as partners in customer success all the time. You know, we want to be seen as partners to our customers. We don't want to just be another vendor. We want to have that deep relationship. We want to be embedded in their organization. And I love the idea of using gamification and incentives to drive that because there are layers to that partnership, right? There is multiple Personas, there's different relationships you have to nurture and different interests. So I love the idea of actually using incentives as a tool to get the customer moving forward in whatever journey they are part of, whether they are, uh, an end user, a champion, an executive in the business. That is such a cool concept. Um, and you just acquired Ever after, as you said. Ever after is a really beloved product in the customer success community, I would say. I'm a big fan, uh, and I would love to understand what is the vision of Base and Ever after coming together. What is it that you are trying to do? What is the opportunity that you saw?

Speaker A: Cool. So, yeah, we're super excited about this acquisition, first of all, because it's an amazing team. Um, and you know, it's always great to bring in a team that's strong and can help build better and faster and whatnot. But I think there's kind of elements that we look about at the industry which are more macro shifts and then micro shifts, if you will. But on the macro side of things, I personally think that AI is starting to create some kind of convergence between the go to market partners domains, right? So if you think about sales, marketing, customer success and even product, I would kind of argue for many years they would work at silos, right? You know, they'd have their own methodologies, their own blueprints, their own systems, their own data. And this is starting to break for numerous reasons. First of all, because it doesn't make sense at all. It was built like that, I think more because of structures and politics versus what's the best interest of the company or the customer. But beyond that, because AI is so, for AI, data is so important and you can move so fast and you can hyper personalize. All these things require a much more structured approach to how you engage with your customers. Right, or with your partners. And when we think about that, so for us, we look at, okay, where are some of the borderlines that these departments are going to Collaborate much stronger. Where are some of the areas where we believe that we're going to see much more? The flows of engagement with customers and customer experience are going to be more cohesive. We think that customer success and customer marketing, who've been working together anyway for the past years are going to be one of the first places where these things are going to be much more streamlined. Right. So on the macro side we believe that there's going to be a shift in how companies go to market. A shift where they try to create a sensor, uh, a single source of truth, a better way to engage their customers. And for us part of that journey or the first part of that journey is between customer marketing, customer success and all the customer programs. If you think about it so advocacy, program reference programs, communities of program, um, digital onboarding or any type of onboarding, um, ongoing QBRs, all of those are customer facing programs and we think they could be combined. And that's the first element we bring. The customer marketing program side of the house ever after brings the customer success side of the house. Together we create um, both a platform and also a framework that helps make those experiences, those programs more seamless. So that's more on the macro side when you think about a little bit more in kind of the details ever after build amazing um, product with AI around, for example vibe, coding a specific customer experience or creating different elements that are very um, unique per customer per account. And that is something that we thought that is very unique. We didn't see it anywhere else in the market and we thought that that would be a great add on also from any I power to everything that we're building.

Speaker B: Yeah, I know that when we prepared for this conversation we talked a little bit about this evolution of uh, moving away from apartments and those kind of rigid structures into a set of programs that are deployed at different stages in the customer journey, depending on behavioral, um, depending on where they are at, depending whether they have a new stakeholder that joins in, et cetera. Can you unpack for the audience that way of thinking? Because it's very different than what we're used to. We are used to pre sales, post sales like that. Very, very structured approach to basically passing the baton, uh, between the teams. Yeah. Impact for us, how does thinking about uh, this set of program changes the way CS teams work and how we should be thinking about the structure of the customer journey?

Speaker A: Sure. Um, so I think the first framework for us is what we define as customer led growth. When you think about, you're right, there's pre sales and post sales. But at the end pre sales and post sales is a continuum. Sarah from company ABC was a prospect. That's the pre sale. She went through the entire sales journey and eventually she became a customer. That's the post sale. It's still Sarah Cell, company abc. Um, you know, the fact that in your CRM she changed status doesn't change anything else really for her. I mean it's part of her journey. So that's kind of the first thing. And we need to apply those kinds of first principles of hey, we're working with companies, we're working with people with contacts and we're working within their journey with us versus you know, and it kind of should be built around that. Also when you think about the pill, the revenue pillars. So when you think about customer level growth, we talk about, hey, there's acquisition. You know, when you want to bring in you like how do companies make money? Right? It doesn't matter what field there or domain they're in. They either get new customers acquisition or they grow the existing customers they have upsell, cross sell, expansion and of course you need to retain those customers kind of, you know, so retention, those are like the three. It's acquisition, retention and expansion or growth. Those are the ways to, to grow. And all of them are related to customers, right? Of course, expansion and upsell you can only do to your existing customers. Same goes for retention and acquisition. Well, if your existing customers help, it really makes it much easier, right? So whether it is uh, referrals, advocacy, reviews on review sites, comments on social, whether it's LinkedIn or X or Reddit, like at the end your customers are a forced multiplier for any one of those pillars and go to markets because they could also help existing customers. Happy customers that have upselled will help existing customers to upsell. Happy customers that retain will help existing customers to adopt better and retain. Happy customers who or who are, you know, again, vocal can help prospects to make that journey. So that's kind of for me, that line of pre and post sale, it needs to be much more looked as a continuum versus like, you know, there's a border and this is here and this is there. And then post sale it goes even more detailed because there are so many things really when customers are in their original resale journey, there's really only one goal. Turn them into a customer. Like they're a process. Yes, you bring them to an event, have them listen to a webinar or whatever. But at the end, really like book a demo. But at the end you just want them to buy your product. When customers become customers, there's so many new programs and there's so many new Personas because on the customer side there's more people. Normally once they made a decision, yes, buying committees are big, but users are even bigger on the company side. It's also bigger because mostly on, uh, the pre journey you have sales and marketing talking to the customer. Post journey, customer success, sales is still involved. Marketing should do marketing to existing customers. Product comes in and wants to get product feedback and whatnot. Leadership comes in because they want caps or they want to have asked questions or whatnot. So there's more Personas and more departments in the organizational side and more Personas and more departments or users on the customer side. It becomes way more complex and there you have many more program. And that's where we've seen a lot of things break. Because then again, product would run potentially a hey, we need people to be beta customers or give us feedback separately from maybe customer success. Who would look for people who are, uh, I don't know, leading a user group separately for marketing, looking for a speaker and sales looking for a reference person. And all that can happen the same week to the same account, maybe even to the same contact. Not a great experience for the customer and probably not that great for the company.

Speaker B: I'm laughing because that resonates so much. I've been in both the giving and the receiving end of that experience of being targeted with five different things for the same company by different people. And also I know I've been guilty of the same because we have our customers and we all connect with them and we have all these. What you said about the betas, uh, the events, the they ask for the favor of being a reference call, all this stuff can hit at the same time. Never mind when you have other things like a CSM trying to drive adoption, where there's a pricing change, where there's. So there's just so much that happens. And I'm glad that you touched on this, uh, point of the Persona based. And I think usually when we think about customer success, we have, um, this behavior, this attitude of thinking about the account and the account as a unit. But sometimes we forget that inside the account there are many different people. And I, uh, usually use the example of HubSpot being a customer platform. You have sales reps, support reps, sales managers, customer success directors. You have so many different people that have different objectives in the product that are in different places in their journey and treating it as a unit. And just thinking everybody's in exactly the same place every time is a recipe for disaster, because people are not. And if you try to speak to them like they are, it won't resonate. So I know we've very, very briefly talked about AI, but, like, I feel like this is one of the things that AI is going to be good at. Right? Is this complexity? One, I want to ask you specifically on this. Like, how do you think AI is going to impact this? But even more broadly, are there other places that you see AI having a big impact in the customer journey?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. First of all, yes, I think we need to think about accounts and contacts. And I think, uh, and this. I come mostly from the marketing practice. So, you know, we think in marketing, we think a lot about Personas and ICPs and all these kind of, you know, ideas of we need to target specific people with specific messaging. And I think this is the time where now everybody could adopt it. It doesn't really matter if it's customer success or sales or marketing or product, that if I have a customer, right, and in that customer, in that account, I have 12, 15 different contacts, there's a lot of differentiation between them. Number one, what is their seniority? Is this a VP versus, you know, a user? Number two, where are they in the journey? Are they. Maybe the company's with me for a year or for two years, but this person just joined, so he's literally with me for a month. Like, where are they in their journey? Then? What are they trying to achieve? Most importantly, what is their outcomes? What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve? And then comes, you know, another layer of personalization, which is just what are their preferences? Do they communicate through Slack, through email, whatever, you know, from Portals, in App? Do they come to our events and meet in person? They don't, you know, and so on. So when you think about all those aspects, there's so much personalization that could and should be done. And personalization is not a goal, it's a means. The goal is to get your customers to behave or complete the journeys that make sense for you and for them together with your product or with your offering. And personalization ideally allows you to just get better behaviors, better completion, better adoption, because it just resonates better with the person that you're asking to do something. Um, so that's why personalization a little bit, is important. And you have to go to that detail. And then to your question about AI, yes, personalization was very hard or harder when you didn't have AI, but now you could literally know everything about that customer, that Persona. So you could think about it's not just the data about the account. Yes, of course we want to know the health score and how active they are in the product and all the telemetrics which are important. But then what is their title? What is their role? Like you mentioned HubSpot. So are they using HubSpot for sales or are they using HubSpot for marketing? That's number one. Then you know, are, ah, they the leader, the director, the VP or one of the users. And then you know, how do we make sure that they, if they're a salesperson, that they know the new features they could leverage or if they're a marketing person that they know that they give us feedback or whatnot. So how do we take each Persona through those journeys? AI allows us to really log all that, including their preferences, including understanding account, very detailed account and contact level data and reaching out to a point where you can say, yes, I can reach out. One of the things we always say, you know, with customer success and customer marketing flows, is that if sales or marketing needs a customer, they would go out to customer success many times and ask for approval, right. And say, hey, you know, can we use this customer? When customer success thinks that accounts, they would say, well we used this customer last week, we can't use them again this week. Which is right. They should protect their customer. But when you think with AI, not so much the accounts, you think it kind of accounts in context, it's like, yes, we used this customer last week, but we used Sheila last week. This week we actually what they're needing, they need Josh. So we're like, it's not a problem, we can do that again. Probably. So being able to in a very minute manner understand and see the data, but also personalize the outreach and it's also going to be relevant. We're going to ask Sheila, uh, something that's relevant for her. Maybe Sheila, uh, doesn't like being a beta customer. She doesn't like answers, surveys she doesn't like. We're not going to ask her to meet product. It's not her thing. But Josh continuously on the community gives us feedback and says things he wants to see and gives. So we're actually going to turn him into a, uh, maybe product supporter or advocate versus you know, somebody that speaks publicly. So AI allows us to gain all those insights and then create the right kind of outreach and the right personalization that's in the personalization layer on a more Detailed layer. I think it just allows to scale. Listen, we're all super busy with AI. We're even busier. CSM sometimes have 50 or 100 or 150 accounts to manage. Like no human can really manage 150 accounts, you know, in a very detailed manner. But AI allows you to do that because it allows you to create a lot of the personalized outreach, a lot of the signals to see which one needs tendons now, a lot of the understanding of what's the next best action in that journey for that account, for that contact. And from a customer perspective, they feel like they're getting that tender loving care, that treatment that they should. But for. And from, um, CSM or any person in the company perspective, you could really engage and activate each individual customer in the right manner, but at scale. So AI allows just so much more scale, so much more insight, so much more activation, so much more personalization, and so much more unique experiences that it's just. It makes it much, much better, I think, for the customers and also much better for the companies.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love, I love that you said two things that, uh, I think every single customer success leader right now is thinking about orchestration and personalization. Like, how can you use AI to treat every single customer like they were the only one? You know, that you know them deeply. You can speak to the thing that they're trying to do, the objectives that they have, the job that they need to do in their organization. I think that's the promise. I will say that I'm yet to see somebody doing this really well.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And I know every time we talk about, you know, customer journeys so many times, like, the journey looks perfect in the. In the presentation. Yeah. On paper.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker B: You know, and you. You could. Obviously it would be very hard, but you could draw like, three, four different Personas in their journeys, et cetera. But those journeys always fall flat because at the moment you put them in the real world, customers don't move in a linear fashion. They go forward, they go backwards, they move sideways. Um, so things don't always go as planned. But one thing that I wanted to dig into, we talked a little bit about programs. We moved into AI. I want to go back to programs because when we were having our prep call, you gave me some fascinating examples of customers that base has that you've seen actual innovative programs that they are deploying throughout the customer journey. Can you share with the audience what are some of these programs?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So I'll share some. I would touch, uh, before that, because I Think it relates. I would talk about the journey. Just one more thing. Somebody gave me a great analogy, which is, you know, think about cruising. I've never been in a cruise, so. But it sounds like it makes sense. So, I mean, customers go on a cruise, right. And you know, you would think the same goes with their journey. You would think that they would just, you know, today we stop in whatever Greece, tomorrow we stop in this island and you have one hour to see the restaurants or see and come back to the ship and what. But some customers say, you know, hell with that. I want to stay in this island for two days. You know, I don't care about your cruise or whatever or your, your agenda. And they would stay there. Right. And in a way, what you want, when you think about those on paper customer journeys, is to have enough flexibility to say, this is the journey that we want a customer to go, but if it takes a week or a month, as long as it progresses, maybe that's okay because that's what the customer wants to do. It makes sense for them. And if we have three stops or seven stops, maybe it doesn't really matter that much as long as we get to that goal. And. Right. And if they stay in this place longer than we, we thought that they need only one hour for this course, but they took two hours for this course. Okay. Being able to have flexible journeys with. Yes. Uh, a phrase, you know, think about it as a, as a. This is our overall journey, and these are our overall steps within that journey and our overall goals. But how different customers, how different people go through that path can differ maybe 10% up or down, or maybe 30% up or down, it's fine. And again, AI allows us to build that. And that's, I think with the big gap between a lot of the programs we build and will connect to programs. And a lot of the things that we think when we put on paper journeys, because we think everybody is the same, they're just not the same. So the programs and the journeys will never work the same for the same for all people, because people are different. But then when you think about those programs. So when we, when we see some of these programs that our customers are building, and I'm always surprised, like with the innovation, I think, you know, the ideas come from them versus from us. But I'll, uh, give some examples. So. Nice. For example, uh, they're in the contact center. One of their great programs is actually connecting product to customers. When you think about how does product communicate with customers normally was, hey, we need Somebody to maybe to interview or, you know, we might want some beta customers. And what they build is this entire continuum between community and feedback product and kind of a, uh, feedback loop so customers can ask for features and you know, feature upvoting in the community. We all know that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't work because you don't listen and you don't respond. So nice kind of iterated on that. Hey, we want to listen and we want to respond. So the feedback from uh, the upvoting, the requests from the community go all the way to the product team go all the way to their jira. You know, then they kind of decide what they do and what they don't do. They look at the upvotes, they look at the comments, look at what people say, they respond there in their jira, they work where they work and then it goes all the way back to the community. So breaking the silos, product can work where they work, customers can be where they are. But there's something in the middle that connecting tissue that allows customer to request at scale, product to respond at scale and everybody to have transparency and see, oh, this, we accepted this, we did it. This is now in beta, this in progress, this is released like, and then think about the next layer. If you want to run some kind of an upsell motion, you could say all these people who wanted this product or this feature, hey, now we can reach out to them and tell them that it's live and potentially upsell them or have them adopted and so on. So that's a program where you connect communities to product teams and product no longer really need to run. They still run surveys here and there, they still do depth interviews, but much less because their whole stream of, you know, they ask customers, these are the five things we can do with AI this month. What do you prefer? Or this is kind of give us ideas of what you need and so on and so forth. And just a continuous discussion between product and customers, which is very unique I think, in that sense. And so that's one example. Another example, constant contact is envisioning a program where they're, where they have customers support other customers in onboarding. They work with SMBs. Not every, you know, every company has its own, you know, kind of ideal ICP. But for SMBs mom and pop shops, sometimes onboarding to a new product is just hard because, hey, they don't have time, they need to run their shop or whatever. So I mean, but if you bring in another and if you have a CSM that's anyway busy in managing so many accounts or can't really dedicate personalized, um, onboarding for every customer, that's hard. But if you bring in another mom and pop shop just across the street, you know, in the same, potentially, you know, either in the same industry but not competing, maybe a different city or in the same city, but a different industry that are using already this product, they can come in and say, hey, this is what I started when I started using constant cloud. Like, this is how I ran my first campaigns, this is how I did my first things. This is what you should do. This is what you should. And first of all there's more trust because hey, it's somebody from the business that they're talking business language, they're not selling me a product. And secondly, they know what to focus on and whatnot. They understand how to run a business but still build new programs and new tools. So they've framed it as a mentor program. You basically have mentees, new customers, mentors, experienced customers. And these experienced customers are mentors, but for a very specific use case, they're mentors for onboarding. They're mentors to help you get onboarded on a new product and they even get rewarded for it because hey, instead of putting resources like dedicated CSMs, we can put resources like our own customers that help us bring. So that's another exciting and amazing programs. We've seen customers do programs around. For example, companies like Okta really creating new experiences and vibe coding a lot of the journeys on onboarding where their customers are, hey, let's create goals. Let's break your onboarding to three, four, five steps. And what do you want to achieve? What is kind of how this, how do you start and then how do you advance? And then what does great look like? And you don't have to be great at day one. It doesn't. It's hard to be great at day one. But if in 12 months and six months, whatever the timeline is, let's build that continuum. So they built a journey and it's not an onboarding journey. Onboarding is only kind of the first step, but then you onboard to the next step or to the next level. And until you become great, until your company is covered with everything and within that journey they have elements of, hey, maybe you need because you want to reach those goals, you might need more products from Okta so they can upsell. But also within that they little by little take the customer to better adoption, take the customer to better utilization of their product, bring in More groups from the customer. And they've vibe coded those, those steps where there is like, this is how an experience looks like for an Okta customer in this industry in these products. Um, step one, and then this is how it looks like for that Okta customer in step two. And so these are just some of the programs we've seen customers use. Adobe uses influencers in, um, universities and colleges to bring in other people to leverage Adobe products. So, you know, we're in a day and age where everybody looks at influencers. Right. So why not businesses leverage influencers and influencers don't have to be Kim Kardashian. It's great, but she's expensive. So, like, let's think about something different. Um, and people who actually use your product and people who are peers. Like if I'm a student using Adobe and other student using Adobe, or again, if I'm an expert using HubSpot and other experts using HubSpot. So I think there's a lot of creativity that could be done. I think that's what I'm trying to say. Whether it's product teams or, you know, trying to find influencers, whether it's prosumers or consumers or, of course, B2B companies, we need to think about what are the goals we're trying to achieve. And especially with AI now the world is a canvas. We can kind of build or create any program. It's really up to you to think what would make the most value for my company and my customers.

Speaker B: Yeah, and that's definitely the vibe I got when we were first talking. It's like the possibilities are endless. You can do so much now with technology because, you know, you used to have to buy stuff really off the shelf. And now with AI, it's possible for you to build some customization on top of your programs. I have to say, like, when you talk about bringing in customers closer to production, I think that's a really exciting prospect. It's also really scary, right. If the product team is saying, we're not going to work on this thing, and suddenly it was an important customer and you need to massage that message to make sure it lands in a certain way. I can see why people have a little bit of anxiety, but in general, I think it's such a valuable thing to be able to not just tell customers, give us your feedback, but actually show them that your feedback matters, that it's being integrated into how we work. And it doesn't feel like a black hole anymore. Right. It feels like a collaboration and it goes Back to that word partnership that you used and the other example that you gave with, like, customers helping customers on, um, board, Like, I cannot tell you how much I love that example because, you know, also HubSpot's SMB, uh, is a big part of our cohort of customers. So I have a lot of experience working with small businesses that, that don't have resources and they want to cut corners. They just want to learn, like, how do I do this thing in the way that other people are doing and seeing success? Let me just get off the ground quickly and just keep moving, because my business really depends. It's life or death for my business how quickly I can move through this. So so much of this resonates, and like I said, it genuinely feels like the possibilities are endless. So my next question for you is a little bit on the prioritization side of the possibilities are endless. How do people decide the. Which programs to invest in? Like, is there a framework that you recommend that you use for people to assess where to start with? With this?

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, you know, I'll say there's two frameworks that are important in my mind. The first one is, um, you know, understand your company's goals and what you're trying to achieve and connect it to that. Without that, nothing works. I mean, you could, you could envision any creative program, but if it's only creative and great, but it doesn't tie in any way to company goals and outcomes, it won't last. It won't work. It might, you know, so the first framework should be let's reverse engineer from the company goals. Right? If the company goals are these five things, we're improving retention, we're trying to get more people to adopt AI products. We're, um, trying to, you know, we're hoping to penetrate into the European market where, you know, whatever those 35 company goals are, start reverse engineering from those and thinking about, okay, which customer programs? Can I think about that? Help me with that. For example, right? If we want people to adopt more AI, what would be the best way to do that? Do we run AI focus groups or AI, uh, you know, champion program or AI user groups where customers teach other customers in person. You know, in Baltimore, they meet together in a coffee shop with five laptops and run that. Maybe, I don't know, making it up. But I'm just saying, based on the company goals, that is the most important way to decide which programs should we focus on first. Because if programs don't tie to revenue, don't tie to outcomes, it's going to be very hard to justify them, especially in this day and age. And the second thing, or the second framer is, and we've had a bit of chat of that between, you know, how people may be more so in customer success than maybe in marketing, but this, you know, fear of failure. So the second framework is just experimentation. In marketing, experimentation is inherent, come from HubSpot A. B testing is something every marketer kind of knows. Right? So basically we're saying, we don't know what's going to work. We're going to try version A, we're going to try version B, and one of them is going to do better. Great, we'll choose that one. And yes, in that process, we're going to make a mistake. We're going to run version a on, um, 100 or a thousand customers, only to find out later that version B is better. So what? So the idea of an AI in a way encourages experimentation. Every CEO, every cco, every cmo, all the executives are talking about, hey, we need to adopt more AI, we need to use it more. What is adopting AI if not experimentation? You know, you try to, I haven't found yet, somebody that on their first shot of AI, got what they wanted. I mean, yes, maybe when you ask ChatGPT, you get the right answer. Not even then, but when you try to build your own GPT or when you try to kind of customize it to do what in your tone and voice or whatever, it's always experimentation. So when companies say adopt AI, basically what they're saying, experiment, right? What is adopt? Like go experiment. So the frameworks for me, when you think about prioritizing customer programs, are, number one, how do those programs tie to company goals? And number two, how do I experiment in a way that I could basically, in a relatively short time, get to the point where I'm seeing that connection to the goals. I'm seeing some, you know, early success. As long as you focus on those, I think it's much easier to decide what you do and what you don't. Because if something is very well tied to goals, but you can't envision a way to roll it out with experimentation, you can't envision a way to kind of take it, you know, um, to test it out, then maybe that shouldn't be your first choice. And vice versa, if something you can experiment but doesn't affect goals, well, why do that?

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that this type of very bullish thinking about experimentation, it's something that's new for customer Success. You talk about failure. Ah, fear of failure. And I think that's the right way of looking through this because it feels like it's so high stakes. It feels because it's your customer, because they are paying you, because they can decide to cancel, that there is such a high stakes situation. So I will add one thing to what you said, and I really love that scientific mindset. I would also say start small. The idea of an experiment isn't a complete reinvention of your entire go to market engine. It starts small. If you do one a B test, you're going to follow one path and then you're going to have, uh, an option B, have a tight hypothesis, a very controlled environment. Test that small thing. If it works, great, move forward. If it doesn't, divest or learn from it, go at it again, but do it in small pieces. I think that that has been a really game changer for me and my team and how we think about how we transform ourselves. That the idea of transformation is that it's this big bang, you come out and everything is different. The reality of transformation is like a million steps, a million iterations. And yes, in two years you look completely different than you look two years ago. But every day just doesn't feel completely different. Uh, so I definitely add that to it.

Speaker A: Totally agree with start small. And I would say you could entrust your customers. So when you say start small, some of the things we tell our customers is, hey, are you having a pilot program? So let's say you're launching again a community or an advocacy program or an onboarding program. Doesn't matter which customer program you're launching. Are you starting small with including 5, 10, 25, doesn't really matter. Customers that you trust, they would love to be part of that closed group that could influence this program. And you get, uh, an opportunity to basically launch it and say, hey, we're thinking of launching this, we'd love your feedback. We'd like you to be like a beta customer for the program. So it's not a beta customer for our product, it's a beta customer for our program. And you know, we're thinking of a cab. Would you be, uh, and basically saying, and iterating with customers and starting small, even if you do a cab. So maybe I talk to two, three customers first. I get their feedback, I get their understanding of what they're willing to do, how they've seen other cabs work and run with that and you don't have. And only then kind of, oh, let's launch a full blown cab and whatever. So I mean, yes, starting small for sure. And starting small by trusting your customers and leveraging them. Even in the early days.

Speaker B: Yeah, gal, shifting gears a little bit. Customer, um, success leaders are being squeezed for budget. Um, I mean, I don't think it's just customer success leaders. I think everybody's being squeezed for budget right now. But um, I think one of the things when we talk about programs, the exciting part of programs is the scalability of a program. Right? You can get more juice out of your budget. Um, but obviously there's some difficult trade offs that CS leaders need to make if they're putting those resources into a program they're not putting into headcount or not putting into another thing that they could be investing on. What do you think from a digital success perspective? What do you think can be very successful? What are some of the trialed and tested things that you think is worth putting the budget behind?

Speaker A: So first of all, it's always going to be that balance, right? Even before the age of AI there was. Okay, but if we bring a tool, you know, yes, one person maybe needs to be the tool owner or administrator, but still that tool ideally helps us scale and we need less people. Um, so yes, budgets are limited and in some cases you have to kind of define or decide, do I rather have a person doing this or do I rather have system tools, AI, whatever doing this? Um, in some cases you need a person, in some cases maybe AI can do it. Um, I think the priority, um, should really be like we talked earlier, where do I see the most impact and where do I have the most challenge? So again, let's take the example of onboarding. I mean onboarding is always going to be a scaled approach. Unless you're selling, you know, millions of billions of dollar contracts and each time kind of doing a very bespoke implementation for your customer. As long as you're in um, software, software as a service or even other other elements, there's some kind of element of scale. Right? So how do I create, you know, same as education by the way, learning. Like when companies have their, their academy or university and they try to take customers through learning. And what is the purpose of learning? The purpose of learning is that they know how to use your product better, they adopt off better, they get more value, but then they stick with you, hopefully more. So I think the priority should be where the programs that we have the most scale. So we're touching more and more customers, whether it's accounts or contacts. But you Know, we're scaling and we're short resourced, right? So normally onboarding teams, they're not going to be like 100 people, right? You know, so how can we scale onboarding? And we've seen a lot of success with that. Where companies are now talking when they talk about digital success, success when they talk about scale cs. One of the first programs is digital onboarding. Because again, normally onboarding teams are small, but you have to onboard a lot of customers. That's where this makes sense. To bring in more, um, tooling, invest in that. Even if it means sometimes, okay, I'm going to lose one person, but in that cost of that, that headcount, that person, I'm going to have a tool that solves for scale. Right? And it's always, I wish it wasn't a world where you have to say, okay, it's this or that. Um, and you know, some people are trying to picture as if, you know, AI is not going to take any jobs, which, you know, AI is going to take some jobs. That's the reality. We're seeing it happening. It's, it's an unfortunate reality, I think, but, but it is. Leaders need to think about which are the jobs that people make most sense, which are the jobs that I need to scale and, you know, based on that kind of say, okay, which headcount. Well, I'll give an example for marketing. So one of our customers, they said, well, we had a content manager, somebody who wrote content. That was a job up until, you know, six months a year ago that CMO decided, she said, well, anyway, I need to review the content after that content person does it. AI anyway, helps me write the content. I could save that salary or that headcount and move that, that money somewhere else. I'm not giving that money away. I'm not giving that budget away. But I'm moving it to a tool, a program, another hire. I'm shifting my hires, I'm shifting my focus. I'm shifting where I need, where I need strong people versus where I need strong tools.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that point. I think it's that push and pull. We're all going through it. We continuously have to ask, ask ourselves, like, what is the best resource to solve this problem? Is it going to be human? Is it going to be technology? Is it going to be a mix and blend of both, which most likely we are in a very human business in customer success. Um, gal, I want to wrap us up with one final question, um, that I think can help the audience, um, which is I'd love your advice for leaders who want to do this, want to experiment with programs, initiatives, advocacy, new motions and customer success. But they are maybe facing organizational resistance. They're maybe paralyzed, you know, in analysis themselves. Like, what's your advice for them to get started?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's common. And I think it goes back to kind of, you know, experimentation, starting small, like you mentioned. Um, so the best way to get buy in in every case, it's not just customer success, as always, is really, you know, instead of asking for something, coming with proof, coming for results. Right. So if I want to roll out some kind of program, what I would do is talk to customers, have them give me feedback about that. That doesn't cost me money. I don't need anything for that. And creating a whole proof point where I say, hey, this is what customers told us many times. When leaders need to get approval from other leaders, right. It's always that internal. Or when employees and teams need to get approval from their manager, from the leader. The internal discussion is much harder for whatever reason, but the external discussion is simpler, right? If whatever you come to your manager and say, hey, we need to do this and that, maybe she or he will say yes, maybe no. If the customer comes to the. And I know that HubSpot is very customer centric. If the customer comes to, you know, HubSpot or to your manager and says, oh, this is a great idea that Daphne had. You should do that. This is why we would, as a customer appreciate it. It 1, 2, 3, probably more likely that they would do it. So I think the first element is just not to be, to be more bullish. Again, like we said in the age of AI, in the age of experimentation, we all need to adopt a little bit of a more courageous, bullish mindset of let's build and break things while we do it, but at least let's be building and creating. I think overall leaders appreciate that. I always rather have somebody that's like, like building, creating, and maybe making, you know, some things succeed, some things don't, but it's at least we're moving. So I think that's one element. The other element is always leverage. A customer always leverage, you know, external voices. So when you come with those ideas, don't come by yourself. Try to create a coalition and ideally create that coalition both with internal people. So if it's something strategic, you probably want to one by one negotiate it with other team leaders. So when you come to your leader, there's like, oh, but these five people already said yes, Right. That always helps. But also come with externals, right? Hey, I also consulted these three customers, which we really appreciate their, you know, their point of view. And this is what they said, or let's get together on a call. So the first part is not being afraid to experiment. The second part is coming prepared with a, uh, coalition of supporters. And the third thing I think is just tying it to goals at the end. Everybody cares about revenue. Listen, your managers, your CEO, they all care about revenue. They all care about the company goals. If you could tie the dots, connect the dots and basically show this is why this program will help us get better adoption, save this money on case deflection, um, increase leads, because we're going to have advocates talking about us externally or whatever it is. But create that breadcrumb of how this ties to goals and how you're going to measure it in 6 months and 12 months. It helps. So those for me are the three things. Be bullish. Leverage, create coalitions, both internal and external, and tie it into goals and revenue. And it should make you more successful in pushing in your programs.

Speaker B: Yael, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. Uh, this is a really, really valuable conversation. I know so many leaders are trying to reinvent the way they approach customer success and looking for ideas and nuggets of information of how to do that. So I think you've delivered that for us today. And good luck with this new, uh, formed company with Baze and Ever After. Like I said, we're massive fans, uh, of Ever after and we can't wait to see what you build together. I'm going to be following from the sidelines, cheering you on. Uh, so thank you so much.

Speaker A: Thank you so much, Daphne. I appreciate it. And thank you for all the content you're sharing and the wisdom you're sharing with the customer success. And I think with go to market leaders, there's a lot to learn.